This painting would take most artists days, even weeks to make. It took Midjourney—a new artificial intelligence program—less than two minutes.
How? According to PC World, Midjourney “takes user-generated queries, runs them through an AI algorithm, and lets the algorithm pull from its source images and apply various artistic techniques.”
For my image, I wanted to see how well the program mimicked distinct art styles. So, I gave it the prompt “Chinese literati painting of white clouds and red birds.” It gave me back four low-resolution images, from which I chose one (what you see above) to “upscale.”
Even a cursory glance at traditional literati paintings will tell you Midjourney didn’t exactly nail it. The image appears to be made from oils, not inks, and the birds are, well, faceless. Still, the image is beautiful, even gallery-worthy, and the implications of this technology are profound.
Anyone with internet access willing to shell out $10 (USD) a month for a subscription can now create stunning art in minutes, all just with a few keystrokes. (Many of the less powerful programs, like Craiyon, remain free; while others, like DALL·E 2 and Meta’s Make-A-Scene, aren’t yet available to the public.) What does that mean for working artists? For human creativity?
“A portrait of director Jordan Peele by Pablo Picasso” prompted Midjourney to create this image.
“To developers and technically minded people, it’s this cool thing,” cartoonist Matt Bors told The Atlantic. “[B]ut to illustrators it’s very upsetting because it feels like you’ve eliminated the need to hire the illustrator.”
The obsolescence of human artists, while frightening, is only one potential consequence of AI-generated art. Writing in The New York Times, columnist Kevin Roose wondered “whether we need to worry about a surge in synthetic propaganda, hyper-realistic deepfakes or even nonconsensual pornography.”
However, I wanted to understand how the rise of programs like Midjourney would shape the future of art. So, I put the question to three of ROM’s curators. Here’s what they said:
Silvia Forni, Senior Curator of Global Africa It is interesting, but derivative. Midjourney can generate cool images, but in my mind, it still does not replace the work of an artist. It is a tool that can “create” only using the visual vocabulary that was developed by artists of the past. It is fun but not moving. It does not present new visual vocabularies. It is a tool. Maybe, in the hand of an artist, it can become surprising and moving, but to be so it would require the creative ability of someone able to instruct the system to do something that the general user cannot achieve, something that pushes the envelope and generates awe. Otherwise, it is just a new accessible fun tool that people will play with until the next trendy program hits the market.
Justin Jennings, Senior Curator, American Archaeology Machine learning (ML) is already changing the way we study ancient art. Archaeologists encounter the past in fragments worn down and faded from the passage of time. Reconstruction is a leap of faith—Is that a leg or a stick? Was that brown or once red?—aided by years of experience. ML projects are currently training computers on art and architectural styles using massive databases in museums and other institutions. Soon, machines may help fill in the blanks on a dig, “seeing” the most likely vessel form from a tiny fragment or the lost edges of a fresco.
Akiko Takesue, Bishop White Committee Associate Curator of Japanese Art & Culture I am interested in the way artificial intelligence could co-exist with human creativity, rather than replacing it, by providing a new perception. A Japanese traditional weaving company in Kyoto, Hosoo, for example, has recently used AI to generate new designs for obi sash, through machine learning of over 20,000 uncoloured designs from the past. The new designs that AI created were a result of its different interpretations of traditional patterns as well as of the spaces intentionally left blank. Such is where AI can be best utilized to open a possibility of connecting the past and the future.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
